We are not alone. No, I’m not talking about aliens. No, not about surveillance either. We’ve been living with another intelligent life form for a long time. In fact, they’ve been here much longer than we have. They’ve developed their society over tens of millions of years, creating a highly efficient and complex social hierarchy that even humans should learn something from. If you haven’t guessed from the title, I’m talking about leafcutter ants.
Yeah, I’m really talking about ants. It’s a bit hard to believe that ants form one of the more advanced civilizations on Earth, but let me convince you otherwise. Although one ant by itself isn’t necessarily “intelligent”, the structure of their society is. A given leafcutter ant can belong to one of four casts, which are based mostly on its size. The Majors are the biggest of the bunch. They act mostly as soldiers, protecting the colony against any invasion that comes its way. They can also serve as serious muscle, in case something heavy needs to be carried back to the nest, or debris need to be cleared from the foraging path. Speaking of foraging, the Mediae are next on the list. They’re smaller than the Majors, and act as “field agents” for the colony. They find a harvestable plant and cut bits of it off (not necessarily the leaves). They then carry those bits, while patrolled by the third cast, the Minors, back to the nest, where they’re delivered to the Minims. The Minims are the smallest of the four casts, and they have a special job. They’re farmers. Not in some abstract sense of the word; they are agricultural farmers. The Minims cut what the Mediae give them into little pieces and then put those pieces into a fungus garden. The fungus feeds on the leaves, and then produces food for the ants, which can be readily harvested and fed to larvae. This simple yet very efficient relationship between the leafcutter and the fungus has proved to be a very successful strategy. Leafcutters can be found all over the place, and their colonies are quite impressive: their nests are roughly 30-600 m2 in area, and can contain eight million ants. So I’d say they’re a pretty good contender for the “best society on Earth” title, and I encourage you to read more about their interesting little lives. Sometimes it’s the little things that can surprise you.
Nuclear power is a bit controversial. On the one hand, we’re poisoning our planet with CO2 every second we’re not using nuclear power. On the other hand, every second that we do use nuclear power, we’re producing nuclear waste that’ll poison our planet in a few million years. And let’s not forget humanity: we need power. Our population is growing exponentially, and it’ll continue to do that until there are a lot of people on Earth, and they’ll need a lot of energy. We should probably come up with a solution to all this, if we want to survive as a species, and especially if we want to become those cool sci-fi rulers-of-the-galaxy that we’ve always wanted to be. For those of you who are not familiar with how current nuclear power plants work, let me give you a quick run-down of it: we’re essentially causing chain fission reactions, in which nuclei of uranium atoms (or other fissile materials) are split by neutrons. Essentially, we’re shooting little neutrons at the big uranium and causing it to break. In the process we get energy, and a few neutrons as well. Here’s a little animation to illustrate this:
The problem arises with the leftovers: what do you do with split nuclei? Our solution so far has been to store them in big barrels and let the next generation decide what to do with them; a pretty solid strategy until you realize that you’re the next generation. Well, what else can we do? We can leave it alone, we can run away, or we can come up with a better solution. That better solution might involve fusion reactions. Fusion is pretty much the reverse of fission: we take two smaller nuclei, and smoosh them together to make a bigger one. Again, we get energy back, but this time we get many more neutrons. We can theoretically use fusion by itself, but it turns out that fusion doesn’t produce that much energy, so let’s shelf that idea for now. What we can do is harness the power of fusion to catalyse fission in a hybrid nuclear reactor. We’ll be generating neutrons from the fusion reactions, and use them in the fission reactions. Because more neutrons are produced in fusion, we’ll be able to hit more uranium, and extract more energy from the fuel. Not only that, but we can continue to hit the leftovers, and slowly turn them into uranium; yeah, that’s right, we’ll be turning nuclear waste into fuel. The result of this is a highly efficient and environmentally friendly way of producing energy, and it turns out there’s more. If we do it right, we can make these reactors tiny, meaning we’ll be able to implement them into almost anything that uses electricity. And yeah, in case you were wondering, that does include spaceships. Yes! We’ve finally done it! The galaxy will be ours at last, with our highly efficient and non-polluting fleet of spaceships. Now the only thing standing in our way is getting all this “off the ground”…
This blog post is fingerprinted. If you copy-paste it somewhere that can be indexed I will be able to find it, and prove beyond reasonable doubt that you copied it from me. This blog isn’t being served by me, but if it was I could serve a slightly different sentence to each visitor and see what each of them did with the content.
You might think twice about copy-pasting for that next essay huh?
This is possible because of Unicode. You might have heard of it in a story about them adding more emojis or something else equally banal. Essentially it’s a way to turn letters into numbers. Unicode is an extension for the ASCII encoding which adds support for more languages. At the time of writing Unicode contains 112,956 characters from almost every language, dead or not, and, of course, emoji.
Here we find our first technique. Many languages have characters that look like the English alphabet, but aren’t. For example, this is an English ‘a’. This is a cyrillic ‘а’. Can you tell the difference? Well your computer can. It turns out that there are enough similar characters that you can make a sufficiently long string of text unique.
But it doesn’t stop there. Unicode also includes six ‘non-displaying’ characters which aren’t rendered by any font. With this we can encode any information we want in empty space: . You can’t see it, but after that colon there’s the entire text of the bee movie encoded in base 5. Technically this post is 9519 words long.
It’s also how this post is fingerprinted. Each sentence contains a combination of these characters which (almost certainly) has never been written before. These should remain if they’re copy-pasted.
The simple encoder I wrote uses base 5 and a ‘null character’ to encode arbitrary bytes. This could be made more efficient by creating a UTF-8 like variable-length encoding but this format is only about 5 times larger when encoded so it’s not necessary for encoding short works of literary genius.
You can find the encoder (and decoder) here.
How many metres in a kilometre? 1000. How many millilitres in a litre? 1000. How many seconds in a day? Not quite so easy is it. Well, there are 86 400 seconds in a day (depending on your definition of a day but that a whole other thing). Surely there is a simpler, more logical method to represent time. Well yes, there are many forms of decimal time such as swatch time, or french revolution time. French revolution time splits each day up into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds so a day will have 100 000 seconds. This is great for many reasons, Firstly our culture has developed an understanding of the decimal which is system much easier than the base 12/base 60 mess of time system. This will also avoid confusions like “I’ll get there by 7” and no one knowing if they mean 7 am or pm. Of course, we could just use 24hr time rather than “am pm” but few people do and it hardly makes any more sense. The idea of decimal time is not new. In fact, it was part of the original decimal system, but countries which chose to adopt the metric system decided to drop the time component.
Although it’s a cool and interesting idea, I doubt it will become widespread since there are so many systems which we currently use which rely on it such as the stock market, GPS, time zones, computers, cryptocurrencies, and much more. So, sadly we are stuck with a terrible system.
Pandas are cute, right? Well yeah, but does that mean that they are good? Pandas are probably not the best species to spend our money on. This is for plenty of reasons, Firstly there are plenty of other species that make a large contribution to keeping the ecosystem running such as the mangrove dwelling crab which doesn’t quite sound as cuddly as a panda hence why we don’t donate to the crab and rather to the cute panda. Pandas are not good at trying to stay alive; they have a digestive system which is almost identical to that of carnivores yet they eat bamboo. This means pandas absorb almost no nutrients from their food causing them to eat over 18kg of bamboo a day. For us to provide for these pandas we spend billions of dollars. In March 2018, the Chinese government spent 1.5 billion dollars on a panda sanctuary. Pandas are notoriously poor at breeding, one of the ways we have tried to get pandas to mate more is to have people dress up in panda costumes and create pornography which had very little effect. There are plenty of other reasons why pumping billions of dollars into pandas every year is a bad idea but none of them matter, because they are cute and people fund cuteness over keeping the ecosystem afloat, to such an extent that the panda has become the face of the World Wildlife Foundation.
Dungeons and Dragons also known as DnD is a tabletop, role-playing game which was created in 1974 by Gary Gygax. In the game, you can either fight monsters which come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds or you can role-play through different parts of standard medieval fantasy life. This creates a secondary world where players feel as though they become their characters which they play. Players also realise their actions have fewer consequences in the game. In the ’70s there was a fear among parents of the games players thought that DnD caused demon worship and satanic rituals. This was brought on by the tragic death of a player who’s mother didn’t particularly like the game and saw the opportunity to draw a conclusion that it had a psychological effect on children. We now know she was right! It does have a psychological effect but not a negative one but rather a strong positive effect, in fact, some therapists have decided to run games of DnD for their patients. In some cases, players were struggling to say no or turn anyone down, so they played DnD where the therapist was able to take up the persona of anyone they interacted with, and specifically showed them that declining something won’t cause anyone else to hate or despise you. So DnD has made big psychological impacts on its players but has not caused anyone to start worshipping demons.
I’m sure everyone has been stuck in traffic before, and while you’re waiting for the car to move, you’ve wondered why can’t they just build more roads, so that all of this would go quicker? There is a so-called paradox; Braess’ paradox, which says that in some specific cases removing a road might actually be better.
This sounds completely counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you think about five simple roads that are used to connect two towns. Imagine two towns, town A and town B. To get from town A to town B there are two possible routes. The first route consists of taking a motorway like street which takes 45 minutes to travel, regardless of the traffic, and then taking a single-lane road where the travel time depends on how many cars are passing through the road per hour. The travel time for this section can be given by T=V/10, where T is the travel time and V is the number of cars passing through the road per hour. The second route from town A to town B is the same, except the single-lane road precedes the motorway. This can be represented by this diagram. The thick light blue lines represent the motorway roads, and the thin dark blue lines represent the single-lane roads
Currently, if you were wanting to travel between the two towns, there would be no difference between which path you take, so the number of cars is split so that approximately half of the cars drive on each route. For example, if there is a total of 400 cars who need to travel between the two towns each hour, around 200 cars will be travelling on each of the single-lane roads per hour, so that part of the trip will take 20 minutes, giving each person an overall travel time of 65 minutes.
Now imagine you are one of these people and are frustrated by the traffic on the single-lane road, and you and your friends complain enough to get the councils to build a new road, connecting the two different routes at the point where they switch between the motorway and the single-lane road, like this. The new road is represented by the green line.
Imagine that the new road is so short that it had a negligible amount of travel time associated with it. Now there is a choice that people travelling have to make. When they start driving, it makes a difference whether or not they take the motorway or the single-lane road first, and then when they get to the new road, they can decide again which type of road they will take. Any logical person would decide to take the single-lane road both times. Why? Because even if all 400 people decide to take that road, the travel time will be 40 minutes on each section, which is shorter than taking the equivalent motorway section which takes 45 minutes regardless of the traffic. Therefore, the overall travel time is now 80 minutes which is definitely longer than the 65 minutes travel time before the new road was built. In this case, the opposite of the paradox is being illustrated, how adding another road makes traffic worse. This happens because the traffic is only taking one route instead of being spread out over two different routes as before. It relates to the Nash equilibrium, which occurs in ‘games’ or situations in which all the individual players want to get the most beneficial outcome for themselves. A Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies that all the players act out, where none of the players benefit from changing their strategy. In this case, a Nash equilibrium exists, however, it is not necessarily the case that it gives the maximum benefit possible to each of the individuals.
This example might seem very contrived, and you might be wondering if this so-called paradox has had any applications in the real world. One situation in which this happened was in 1990 in New York, when 42nd street was closed for Earth day, and the amount of traffic in the surrounding region was less, due to the closure of this road. It is however only seldom the case that this situation occurs, and hence it is unlikely that it will solve all of our traffic problems, but I think that it should still be considered when planning a road network.
On Friday the 27th of September there was a global climate strike in which it was reported by Schools Strike 4 Climate NZ that over 3.5% of our total population participated in the strike, the second highest participation rate per capita. That’s at least 170,000 people demanding climate action, or at least concerned enough to address anthropogenic climate change. 80,000 of which were striking in Auckland, and there’s a high chance you were one of them too. This 3.5% threshold for peaceful protest has been argued by political scientist Erica Chenoweth to lead to real change by governments, which leads one to wonder how social movements such as Fridays for Future are able to mobilise such large numbers of people…
What do protests, sports games, and music festivals have in common? It’s the uncomfortable closeness to strangers, the communal chanting of words you have instructed to yell, the inability to find fresh air to evaporate the sweat on and around you. The atmosphere of such crowds produces fervent support for whatever everybody is gathered there for, where your presence feels welcomed, even if you’re anonymous to all the strangers around you. This literal echo chamber is embodied by the concept of Collective Effervescence.
This concept may be one explanation as to how these crowds build up. Coined by Durkheim, this idea has many applications to crowd psychology, explaining how a group comes together to promote the same ideas and messages, with enthusiasm growing from the collaborative process. It describes how being together in close proximity to others “generates electricity that quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation.”
That is not saying that this is an exhaustive factor as to why there were so many people were striking. There are many stronger (but I wanted to discuss this) factors such as supporting the ideas that are being spread, belief that real change is possible, concern over the impending doom facing our futures, etc. I’m just stating that humans are naturally social people, so will likely join their friends or go because many other people selected “going” on the Facebook event page. The energy in a crowd is like nothing else – even if some of the chants feel a bit wack, you still feel a connection to the people around you because you’re all championing the same issue. Being part of a large crowd provides these effervescent experiences that satiate the human need for belonging.
Though Collective Effervescence definitely applies to some problematic situations (e.g. rise of extremist nationalist ideologies/white supremacy), in this case it has been beneficial in enabling more people to actively engage in the issues affecting them, rather than apathetically ignoring the metaphorical burning building they’re suffocating in. The typical psychological technique of fear arousal only goes so far to recruit new members to a movement; benefits must also be presented to the indifferent. They get the excitement of joining a crowd while your beliefs are strengthened and validated by a crowd supporting the same ideas. The same thing happens at concerts – how many people do you know go when they only know less than five songs by the artist? According to Valur Grettison, 15% of Iceland’s population attended Ed Sheeran’s concerts this year. Bandwagons are real and have the potential to do more good than harm; the unifying effect of crowds and possibly peer pressure have been driving people to join in social movements when they might have been more reluctant otherwise.
So next time you get frustrated over how performative some people’s actions are because they don’t seem to care about issues as deeply as you, just do some angry Googling and you’ll find some psychological concept providing insight into how this may function to strengthen whatever you support. Also remember that for every insincere person deciding to leave because they’ve “been here for an hour already”, there are thousands more still walking and getting sunburnt.
This article has been approved by Winnie the Pooh.
Have you ever been walking with two other friends and been that one person walking behind or in front because there wasn’t enough space on the footpath for all three of you? Social exclusion be like that sometimes. But, there is a way to alleviate the awkwardness in these situations, according to research conducted by Tai, Zheng, and Narayanan (2011). They found that touching teddy bears can help lessen the pain of being socially excluded, encouraging more positive feelings and prosocial behaviour.
From prior research (and probably personal experience because: we live in a society), these researchers were aware of the many psychological changes associated with social isolation. Social exclusion tends to increase aggressive behaviour (Leary, Twenge, & Quinlivan, 2006), and impairs self-regulation (i.e. more impulsive actions) (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Twenge, 2005). People who are excluded tend to also have flattened affect, which means that their ability to feel emotions and experience empathy is reduced. Although it would logically be expected that socially rejected individuals would seek attachment with others and try to maintain their connections to others, their rejection actually leads to less prosocial behaviour (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007).
The psychological effects of social rejection are linked to physical processes. There is evidence that social pain involves the same physiological mechanisms involved in physical pain – that is, social rejection is linked to increases in blood pressure and cortisone (the stress hormone). The activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex also corresponds to both physical pain and social exclusion (Einsberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003).
Touch was studied because there was evidence that it could ameliorate the pain of social separation, particularly in Harlow’s monkeys (Harlow, Dodsworth & Harlow, 1965). In this study, baby rhesus macaques were taken away from their biological mother, and placed in a lab with two inanimate substitutes for a mother, one cloth mother and the other a wire mother. The monkeys were observed spending their time attached to the cloth mother, going to the wire surrogate mother only when needing nourishment and the wire mother was the only option able to provide that nourishment. This study was particularly interesting, as it showed that comfort through touch can be more powerful than food.
A baby rhesus macaque. As you can see, it prefers the cloth mother.
Now, going back to the teddy bears. These researchers proposed that a novel solution of touching inanimate object could help the pain caused by social exclusion. Teddy bears were chosen as substitutes to human touch because they are likely to be anthropomorphized, with traits such as fuzziness and softness that were usually associated with cuddliness and warmth. As they are often used as transitional objects to cope with sleeping alone in childhood, teddy bears are also believed to provide temporary emotional support. Hence teddy bears are associated with positive feelings due to the comforting tactile sensations and emotional security. Touch is associated with positive feelings, and also with relieving stress from situations of social exclusion.
here’s my teddy bear lmao
From the experiments that Tai, Zheng, and Narayanan conducted, they discovered that touching a teddy bear resulted in more prosocial behaviour among the socially excluded groups, and no significant difference in the socially included groups. In the experiment, participants were told to evaluate consumer products, which included the teddy bear. Those in the experimental group had the teddy bear placed in their laps and were encouraged to touch the teddy bear to properly evaluate the item, while those in the control condition had the teddy bear placed an arm’s length away so that they could not touch it. The prosocial behaviour that was used included volunteering to participate in more experiments, and choosing to offer more money to recipients in a task where participants split money between themselves and an unknown person.
So, next time you know you’re gonna have some lonely moments at a party, make sure to bring a teddy bear with you! Or add a plushie onto a keyring and attach to your keys! Or wear a fluffy outfit! Or bring a pet! If you forget to bring something comforting to touch, find a blanket at the party! There are many ways you can make your social experiences less painful when you remember that teddy bears are always here for you. 🙂
References
Baumeister, R. F.,
DeWall, C. N., Ciarocco, N. J., & Twenge, J. M. (2005). Social exclusion
impairs self-regulation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88(4), 589. doi:
10.1037/0022-3514.88.4.589
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290-292. doi: 10.1126/science.1089134
Harlow, H. F.,
Dodsworth, R. O., & Harlow, M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in
monkeys. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 54(1), 90. doi: 10.1073/pnas.54.1.90
Leary, M. R., Twenge,
J. M., & Quinlivan, E. (2006). Interpersonal rejection as a determinant of
anger and aggression. Personality and social psychology review, 10(2), 111-132.
doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_2
Tai, K., Zheng, X., Narayanan, J., 2011. Touching a teddy bear mitigates negative effects of social exclusion to increase prosocial behavior. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 2(6), 618-626. doi: 10.1177/1948550611404707
Twenge, J. M.,
Baumeister, R. F., DeWall, C. N., Ciarocco, N. J., & Bartels, J. M. (2007).
Social exclusion decreases prosocial behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(1), 56. doi:
10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.56
I’m sure
you’ve all heard about it – measles seems to be the buzz word of 2019. Whether
it was someone in your classes, or just in the news, 1868 people have been
diagnosed with measles in New Zealand this year. So what is measles, and why do
we all care so much?
Measles is a viral disease, which is mainly spread by coughing or sneezing, or by close personal contact with an infected person. It is highly infectious, with approximately 90% of non-immune people likely to become infected if they interact with an infected person. Once it has been breathed in, the virus invades cells in the airways. After replicating in these cells, it enters the lymphatic (immune) system, and spreads around the body. Symptoms of measles include a four-day fever, cough, rhinitis (i.e. head cold) and conjunctivitis (red eyes), as well as the characteristic rash. Measles also often has complications, from diarrhea to pneumonia. Because of its action on the immune system, it also makes people more susceptible to other infections.
These complications (coupled with the highly infectious nature of the virus) are what makes measles so dangerous. The effects of measles on the immune system can linger for years after the infection is cleared. It is not the measles itself that causes death, but the complications that follow. In New Zealand, more than 15% of measles cases result in hospitalisation, an incredibly high rate. Particularly vulnerable groups include pregnant women, infants or immunocompromised patients, all of whom have compromised/underdeveloped immune systems already. This year, New Zealand has seen two mothers experience miscarriage due to their contraction of measles.
The best
treatment for this measles outbreak is undoubtedly prevention. People need to
be vaccinated. One dose of the MMR vaccine, which many people receive as
children, protects about 95% of people against measles, and two doses protects 99%.
It is important that we maintain high vaccination rates in order to protect
those who cannot be immunised (e.g. pregnant women, young babies and the
immunocompromised) as these are often the most vulnerable groups. Offering ‘herd
immunity’ is one of the most powerful ways we can protect these groups. Rising
parental refusal of vaccination is thought to play a role in increasing rates
of measles infection. So, why should we care? Maybe not for your own health,
but for the health of all those around us; to protect those who can’t protect
themselves.
Science Scholars 2019 
